Given the cyclical nature of ocean oscillations, solar activity, orbital parameters, etc combining in chaotic ways yet interrelated, what is the predominant cyclical component in temperature data on relatively short time scales of say 30-80 years? Plotting HADCRUT3 variance-adj global mean data with a 2-5 harmonic (~32-80 year) band-pass filter and then plotting the inverse fourier reconstruction below shows the 2 most recent cycles 1883.75-1937.75 lasting 54 years and 1937.75-1999.25 lasting 61.5 years.

The publication Climate Changes and Fish Productivity analyzed three 1500-year temperature proxies including ice cores and tree rings, and found the predominant periodicity of climate fluctuations during the last 1000 years to be ~60 years with the variation from 55-76 years. This same periodicity was also confirmed by other authors.

Given the typical cycle length of ~60 years, the present cycle won't peak until ~2059. BTW, fish stocks of all species studied explodes on the upside every time the planet warms. More good news about GW!

The foregoing suggests that the temperature data as analysed and presented by the IPCC and associated international research organisations do not provide a sound basis for the alarmist conclusions that have been reached and presented to governments. There is also a question about the validity of adjustments to Australia’s temperatures by our Bureau of Meteorology in compiling the so-called “high quality” data set. The temperature analyses, along with other similar alarmist claims, certainly justify a major independent inquiry before any government action is taken to reduce emissions of CO2.

Outstanding video explaining the real science of climate change and how Climategate/IPCC shows that climate "science has become so politicized that we no longer look at data." Here (click on 2nd video at bottom)

Couple of points from the lecture that expand upon recent posts here:

1. There have been 6 major ice ages. In 5 of the 6, CO2 levels were significantly higher than they are today, up to 1000 times higher! In 2 of the 6 ice ages the entire planet was frozen over ("snowball earth"), yet with higher levels of CO2 than today.

2. Spectroscopy data indicates a logarithmically declining effect of increasing CO2 levels on climate, such that at the current level of 385ppm, a further doubling of CO2 levels will have no effect on climate. (which of course explains #1).

Saturday, January 30, 2010

From the "you just can't make this stuff up dept.," the latest revelation of very-non-peer-reviewed research in the IPCC reports is a citation to an article in Climbing magazine claiming decreased ice on mountaintops. From Wattsupwiththat.com, which also reveals another source of IPCC very-non-peer-reviewed research from a student's dissertation.

(image was altered to add "IPCC" and "lack of")

Meanwhile, the railroad engineer & smut novelist head of the IPCC, Rajendra K. Pachauri recently commented on the "pristine" nature of IPCC reports: "The IPCC reliesentirely on peer reviewed literature in carrying out its assessment" and "The entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments."

And in related news, Pachauri prefers his fossil-fuel chauffeured car to his chauffeured electric car, provided to him for his 1 mile daily commute from his £4.5 million home to his office, but urges others to reduce their carbon footprints and to take public transportation, cycle, or walk.

The 1990 IPCC Report contains an explanation as to why they knew the effect of greenhouse gases on climate:

"measurements from ice cores going back 160,000 years shows the earth’s temperature closely parallels the amount of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere (see Figure 2). Although we do not know the details of cause and eﬀect, calculations indicate that changes in these greenhouse gases were part, but not all, of the large (5-7 °C) global temperature swings between ice ages and interglacial periods."

(emphasis added) Thus, the IPCC argued in 1990 that, although the cause and eﬀect was not known, calculations can be made that are in accordance with what is expected! We now know (as they did not know in 1990) that the temperature changes manifest in the Vostok ice cores preceded the changes in CO2 by approximately 800 years, i.e. that temperature drives CO2 levels, not the other way around. This is exactly as expected from solubility data of CO2 in water v. temperature. Hmmm, no mention of this embarrassing error in subsequent IPCC reports, but never mind, they made their calculations before the high resolution ice core data on CO2 was available, and they're stickin' to 'em!

For an interesting look back at the history of IPCC deceptions, it is worth reviving the 1996 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, A Major Deception on Global Warming, written by Dr. Frederick Seitz, former president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society.

During the preparation of the IPCC's Climate Change 1995, the US State Department weighed in with a letter pressuring the IPCC to make changes to the document's important eighth chapter so as to make the text of the report conform to the recommendations of the pro-man-made-global-warming Summary for policymakers, which had been written by policymakers (not scientists) priorto the scientific report written by the IPCC scientists. This arbitrary rewriting of the document, over the objections of the scientists who participated in the original writing, was called "the most disturbing corruption of the peer review process I have ever witnessed" in Dr. Seitz's editorial. This adulterated 1995 document formed the "scientific basis" of the Kyoto Protocols. Numerous other accounts of similar IPPC corruptions of the peer-review process have led to resignations from the IPCC by prominent scientists (noted here and here and several others).And see here for the political history of James Hansen of NASA/GISS.

Well, maybe the second greatest lie ever told, after the anthropogenic GW hoax. From The Telegraph (UK):

"But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story. Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years."

This outstanding pre-climategate film by the documentary-maker Martin Durkin for UK television presents the arguments of top scientists who don't believe that CO2 produced by human activity is a significant cause of climate change and exposes the self-fulfilling man-made-global-warming industry.

From OPEN Magazine, "We’ve been had. It is now clear that the Nobel Prize-winning global warming report is full of exaggerations, inaccuracies, illogical conclusions and outright lies. The real tragedy is that no one seems to care anymore about the actual state of our environment."

and also seeConvenient Untruths from the same magazine, which summarizes findings of the London High Court ruling that there were at least nine gross errors in Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, that the film could not be shown to UK schoolchildren without a ‘guidance note,’ and that these statements in the film do not follow ‘mainstream scientific consensus.'

Head of the UN IPCC now busted lying about when he knew about Glacier-gate (2 months before the Copenhagen conference - in contrast to his prior lie of first hearing about it after Copenhagen). From The Times (UK)

Friday, January 29, 2010

From The Telegraph (UK): A warm atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide may have surrounded the Earth in an ancient ice age, new research has suggested. Researchers at the University of Birmingham found that 630 million years ago the earth had a warm atmosphere full of carbon dioxide but was completely covered with ice. The scientists studied limestone rocks and found evidence that large amounts of greenhouse gas coincided with a prolonged period of freezing temperatures. Explanation at website of lead author.

"In fact, the increase in the CO2 content of the modern atmosphere appears to have not been negative at all (on corals). In fact, it appears to have been positive, which should only have been expected in light of what we know about the beneficial influence of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on the photosynthetic rates of marine microalgae, such as those that comprise the food-producing symbiotic zooxanthellae of corals"

From the Houston Chronicle
Clearly, the science is not settled. Although this article doesn't state, the science is not even settled as to whether man-made greenhouse gases have positive, negative (see here), or no feedbacks (see here and here) nor the magnitude if any.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

hard to keep up, but another IPCC prediction bites the dust as the slew of non-peer-reviewed claims from the activist group World Wildlife Fund (WWF) cited in the IPCC AR4 report surfaces as another unsubstantiated alarmist false claim. [Note: IPCC says its reports only rely upon peer-reviewed scientific research, and this claim itself has proven repeatedly false]

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The processes controlling the carbon flux and carbon storage of the atmosphere, ocean and terrestrial biosphere are temperature sensitive and are likely to provide a positive feedback leading to amplified anthropogenic warming. Owing to this feedback, at timescales ranging from interannual to the 20–100-kyr cycles of Earth's orbital variations, warming of the climate system causes a net release of CO2 into the atmosphere; this in turn amplifies warming. But the magnitude of the climate sensitivity of the global carbon cycle (termed γ), and thus of its positive feedback strength, is under debate, giving rise to large uncertainties in global warming projections. Here we quantify the median γ as 7.7 p.p.m.v. CO2 per °C warming, with a likely range of 1.7–21.4 p.p.m.v. CO2 per °C. Sensitivity experiments exclude significant influence of pre-industrial land-use change on these estimates. Our results, based on the coupling of a probabilistic approach with an ensemble of proxy-based temperature reconstructions and pre-industrial CO2 data from three ice cores, provide robust constraints for γ on the policy-relevant multi-decadal to centennial timescales... Our results are incompatibly lower (P 0.05) than recent pre-industrial empirical estimates of ~40 p.p.m.v. CO2 per °C, and correspondingly suggest ~80% less potential amplification of ongoing global warming.

There is most certainly a pattern to climate change…but it’s not what you may think: For at least 114 years, climate “scientists” have been "crying wolf" that the climate was going to kill us…but they have kept switching whether it was a coming ice age, or global warming.

A 2001 article in Science entitled "Was the Medieval Warm Period Global?" states ,"The Little Ice Age and the subsequent warming were global in extent... Borehole records both in polar ice and in wells fromall continents suggest the existence of a Medieval Warm Period."From the conclusions of the Science paper:

"The geographic pattern of Holocene climate fluctuations remains murky, but several things are clear. The Little Ice Age and the subsequent warming were global in extent. Several Holocene fluctuations in snowline, comparable in magnitude to that of the post-Little Ice Age warming, occurred in the Swiss Alps. Borehole records both in polar ice and in wells fromall continents suggest the existence of a Medieval Warm Period. Finally, two multidecade-duration droughts plagued the western United States during the latter part of the Medieval Warm Period. I consider this evidence sufficiently convincing to merit an intensification of studies aimed at elucidating Holocene climate fluctuations, upon which the warming due to greenhouse gases is superimposed."

This paper also prompted an internet posting critical of Michael Mann's hockey stick paper, which concludes, "global warming is natural and the recent warming is probably no exception." The Climategate emails include two email exchanges hereand here in which Mann appears to be infuriated with the suggestion that the MWP was global and well as any suggestion that the current warm period was similar.

This article prompted the following entry at a now defunct site (climatechangedebate.org) which is quoted in full in the above climategate emails:

Among the conclusions:
1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.
2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.
3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.
4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.
5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.
6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.
7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.

...the heat island signal, measured as the difference between the urban core and the surrounding rural surface air temperature readings taken at National Weather Service stations, averages ~4°C on summer nights (Kirkpatrick and Shulman, 1987; Gedzelman et al., 2003; Gaffin et al., 2008)," with the greatest temperature differences typically being sustained "between midnight and 0500 Eastern Standard Time (EST; Gaffin et al., 2008)." And on a day that they studied quite intensively (14 August 2002), they report that at 0600 EST, "the city was several degrees warmer than the suburbs, and up to 8°C warmer than rural areas within 100 km of the city." ...

Monday, January 25, 2010

i.e. way before the industrial age and escalation of man-made "greenhouse gases," due to recovery from the little ice age.

800,000 years of Siberian temperature history. Left is colder temperatures, right is warmer. Note the recent warming spike near the top of the graph (beginning 250 years ago) and ice ages shaded gray.

Siberia's Lake Baikal is the world's deepest lake. By water volume, its also the largest freshwater lake, containing more water than all five of the Great Lakes combined. Fed by over 300 rivers, Baikal is a barometer for the entire Siberian region.Due to the lake's depth (over a mile deep in many places), it contains the northern hemisphere's most pristine, uninterrupted sedimentary record, allowing highly accurate reconstructions of past temperatures. Baikal's great distance from the moderating effects of any ocean also makes it an ideal site for detecting global warming.

"The 2009 North Atlantic hurricane season had nine named storms, three hurricanes, and two major hurricanes. This is the fewest number of hurricanes for a North Atlantic season since 1997. An average season has 11 named storms, six hurricanes, and two major hurricanes. Only two tropical storms and no hurricanes made landfall in the U.S. for the season. This is only the 13th time that no hurricanes have struck the U.S. during a hurricane season (June-November) since 1943."

The finding is the first to document that the abrupt changes in Ice Age climate known from Greenland also occurred in the southwestern U.S., said co-author Julia E. Cole of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Each climate regime lasted from a few hundred years to more than one thousand years, she said. In many cases, the transition from wet to dry or vice versa took less than 200 years.
"These changes are part of a global pattern of abrupt changes that were first documented in Greenland ice cores," she said. "No one had documented those changes in the Southwest before."

Sunday, January 24, 2010

with Gavin Schmidt's (NASA/GISS) priceless "rebuttal," which completely fails to explain the mysterious disappearance of temperature records from the "official" database maintained by NASA/GISS, resorting to the ad hominem argument of attacking the messenger without offering any explanation of the massive NASA/GISS purge of "cold" temperature records.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Expanding upon the last post, the "sunspot integral" (accumulated departure in sunspots v. the monthly mean of 41.2 for the observational period of sunspots 1610-2009) shows good correlation with the temperature record. Excellent correlation (R²=.96!) with temperature is obtained by adding to the sunspot integral the most significant ocean oscillations (the PDO-Pacific Decadal Oscillation + AMO- Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation*3). Various other combinations and permutations of these factors compared to the temperature record have been posted at: 123456, although I have not located others with a correlation coefficient of this magnitude. Contrast the R² of .96 from this simple model (near a perfect correlation coefficient (R²) of 1) vs. the poor correlation (R²=.44) of CO2 levels vs. temperature.

Accumulated departure from the annualized monthly mean (41.2) observed sunspot numbers 1610-2009 shows declining solar activity during the little ice age (LIA) and increasing solar activity during the subsequent recovery from the LIA. The 11 year moving average, corresponding to the 11-year solar cycle, is also plotted. Note the accelerated increase in solar activity beginning in the 1940s and correlation with land temperature data (HADCRU3 5 year moving average).

Using the Pacific Marine Atlas program to plot data from the ARGO global network of 3222 free drifting ocean floats with GPS (data first became available from this program in 2004-see float locations here) shows a downtrend in Sea Height over the past six years (January 31, 2004 - December 31, 2009) using data from the entire network:

(Graph from the Pacific Marine Atlas was digitized using the VistaMetrix program to extract data for purposes of determining trendline)

Friday, January 22, 2010

Headline: “NASA Research Finds Last Decade was Warmest on Record.”
Well, not so in several Australian rural temperature records. “Looking back to 1880, when modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely,” (per NASA press release) the current decade in Australia is 0.6-0.7 deg C cooler than it was in 1881-1890. This estimate is derived from the annual Mean Maximum Temperatures provided by the Bureau of Meteorology for the following meteorological stations: #61055, 46043, 55023, 58012, 64008, 69018, 75031, 83025, 84016, 85096, 90015. These rural stations have temperature records dating back to at least 1881. Long-standing urban stations based at airports or in major cities such as #38003, 61055, 66062, 80015, 86071, and 94029 are not included due to local “urban heat island” effects at these hot spots, which would have artificially inflated estimates by an average 1 degree C this century. Graphs below obtained from the Australian Meteorology Bureau site.

"Another example is Australia. NASA only presents 3 stations covering the period 1897-1992. What kind of data is the IPCC Australia diagram based on? If any trend it is a slight cooling. However, if a shorter period (1949-2005) is used, the temperature has increased substantially."

in addition, the warming trend in the global data 1911-1941 compared with 1979-2009 shows an identical slope/trend of warming, although AGW supporters only say the latter trend is "unprecedented." Link

Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) + Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) versus Temperature (HADCRU3 Global Adjusted Mean) shows excellent correlation and cooling phase beginning in 2000. The AMO typically runs one quarter cycle behind the PDO and the cycles have a typical period of 20-35 years, with the last cycle lasting 31 years. Both have profound effects upon global sea (70% of global surface area) and land temperatures. Thus, the combined cycles may not peak again until ~ 2041-2080 with an interim cool period.

ScienceDaily (2010-01-19) -- Planet Earth has warmed much less than expected during the industrial era based on current best estimates of Earth's "climate sensitivity" -- the amount of global temperature increase expected in response to a given rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. In a new study, researchers examine the reasons for this discrepancy.

Monday, January 18, 2010

i.e. CO2 levels lag temperature as expected from the relation between solubility and temperature.

The above chart is an actual experience curve relating actual CO2 levels with actual global average sea surface temperatures. It is not a time scale, just the simple relation between two physical parameters.

The line is made up of the succession of actual monthly plotted points. If we have regard to the possible errors of measurement of CO2 and SST, it is remarkably consistent. The clear relationship is what would be expected from solubility data. It is only evident in the temperature data from satellite sources. The 21 year moving average covers the double solar cycle, including the change in solar polarity. It also covers El Nino and La Nina events. It also recognizes the longer response time of the oceans. This chart proves that human emissions of CO2 cannot accumulate in the atmosphere. They are scavenged as they occur. We can use the chart to predict the decreased levels of CO2 that will result from cooling. see here and here.

Climatic models suggest that any greenhouse effect should be strongest in the tropical upper troposphere where water vapor is in higher concentration. Satellite data of the upper troposphere (~56,000 ft) show global average temperatures for 2009 (green line) were near the record lows of the past 20 years and did not even approach the 20 year average at any time during the year. This occurred despite steadily rising greenhouse gas concentrations over the past 20+ years.

FRESH doubts were cast over controversial global warming theories yesterday after a major climate change argument was discredited. The International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit its key claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was lifted from a 1999 magazine article. The report was based on an interview with a little-known Indian scientist who has since said his views were “speculation” and not backed up by research.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

ANALYSIS: It used to be cool to be a climate-change crusader. Now the sceptics are in fashion...

The same characters that see a nice summer day as a harbinger of impending climate catastrophe were quick to point out that the cold spell was just weather. In their definition, it’s climate when it’s hot and weather when it’s cold. Such blatant inconsistency means a further loss of credibility.

"If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."-Ronald Coase, Economist

Two of several animations (and here) of the unexplained "revisions" made to "raw" USHCN temperature station data downloaded at different times, which almost always lead to a warming trend over in the 20th century, yet the data still claimed to be "raw."

Friday, January 15, 2010

According to Greenhouse Gas Theory, the middle troposphere should be warming disproportionately as a result of the increase of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. However, satellite measurements from AMSU-A indicate cooling over the past decade in the middle troposphere, despite steady rise in greenhouse gas emissions.